all I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them

A new sharing-oriented economy is emerging. Imagine a world where we don't own 90% of the stuff we keep around the house. Sure, we'll have a TV and toothbrush, but we won't have a power drill. The average power drill is only used for 20 minutes over its entire lifetime. And that's just one of hundreds of things we have lying around the house.

We don't need to own it if we can have instant access to it at all times.

Thanks so much to Seattle 2.0 for having me here at StartupDay 2010. It seriously was a blast talking to so many excited entrepreneurs and pre-entrepreneurs.

Above are my slides from my talk. It's pretty straightforward, in as few words as possible:

First, hate the problem. This means you really connect with something that SUCKS A LOT and you know is a real problem. Come on people, we work in tech. There are a lot of things that are terrible. PC LOAD LETTER, what the heck does that mean!?

Second, ship the solution. The product. Get the smallest possible quantum and don't boil the ocean. You don't know whether your product is goodt il it's out there.

Third, love your users. If you build it, they won't come. Building consumer web startups is absolutely not like building a car, but that's how we think about building them. It's logistics and technology and mechanisms. No, no, no. It's more like throwing a really awesome party. And nobody throws parties for people who they don't love.

So that's what I got in a nutshell. I can't believe how many people have helped us along the way (and we are so far from done!) but it feels great to be able to give back and help more people get to fulfill their dreams.

Seattle is probably the biggest collection of amazing software engineers and product creators outside of the Bay Area -- but they're all locked up in massive vaults called Microsoft and Amazon. Come on out guys, the water's fine.

Really great deck by Harry Brignull. Interaction design is a human experience, and it turns out websites can sometimes be rather similar to that shady used car salesman with his arm around your shoulder. Ech.

Science is about the external world: measurement, controlled experiment, data collection, empiricism. It tests hypotheses against the hard reality of repeatable experiments with objectively measurable results. Those who practice it are called scientists or empiricists.

Reason, by contrast, is internally generated. It’s building mental models of the world, starting with your internal sense for what is right and pure, from which further truths can be deduced. Those who practice reason are called rationalists.

When you build a product, you've got to have a worldview on what people want and what is useful and good. That's product sense. But once it is out in the world, you need to iterate and use empiricism to understand how your creation is doing. That's analytics.

As with science and reason, product and metrics are distinct things that happen to be extra valuable when used in conjunction.

As Freud pointed out, people spend a shocking amount of time in a continuous cycle seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Our internal monologue is but a continuous questioning -- how am I doing, and what should I be doing next? When we meet with friends and family, in between the great stories and moments of laughter and levity-- we ask how they're doing, how that food is, what are you going to order, how was that movie, what's new, and so on.

In essence, when we ask each other how things were, we're comparing our experiences. How was that steak? Great? Awesome, I'm going to have that too. The Other Guys was a great movie? Sweet, I have to see it. It sucked? Thanks for letting me avoid that one. (It was awesome by the way)

Even when we watch movies, we experience, temporarily, the lives of others. We learn not just through the stories and experiences of people we know but also through the media we consume. Thanks to the amazing existence of mirror neurons, as we see and hear things happen to others, our brains fire up the same patterns they would had they happened directly to us.

As it turns out, our brains and minds are elaborate engines for processing information and experiences. That goes for everything from websites to a good meal at a restaurant. So it's natural that we want to avoid pain and seek pleasure through foreknowledge by people we trust.

But that's what Yelp is for. And the web. And Google. The arc of history is that of an ever-increasing amount of empathy -- and the web is merely the latest and greatest enabler in that. The beginning of this arc? Verbal language. Written language. Scrolls. Codexes. The printing press. Paperback books. Paperback computers. And now the infinitely vast and instantaneous Internet.

At first blush, the now-dominant social way we use the Internet seems shallow. Who cares what movie so-and-so watched? Or that they ate at that fancy new restaurant and it sucked. Why should it appear on my Facebook feed at all? But we should care. We do care. It allows us to live better lives. If there is less friction in knowledge, then the good restaurants and the good movies get the attention they deserve. Bad service is penalized. People don't get ripped off so often. Because a durable public channel for feedback exists, restaurants and services can get better.

Less spit in coffee, more awesomeness. We each have a voice in this, and if we pay into the system, we help each other live better... One blog post or Yelp review at a time.

At this moment there are thousands of people connecting to this website and others that are hosted on Posterous. Each of those people comes away from that interaction with a positive or negative experience.

This is true for all websites and all consumer brand experiences actually... If you are Hertz, American Airlines, or even the corner coffee shop, there are experiences and interactions that happen with great frequency.

Our challenge is to make as many of those experiences positive. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. Because it is easy to envision a distant future that is better. But until that future is realized, thousands or millions of other people will have to endure a bad experience before you can get your act together. They may be tiny grievances accumulated over hours and days, but in the meantime a better future is sitting in a Gantt chart or bug tracker or Excel spreadsheet someplace.

These are only the minor annoyances, though I'm sure there are a few major ones as well. But when you add it all up over time and frequency that is one heck of a lot of human pain. Luckily, it is within our hands as designers and engineers and experience creators to turn that pain into happiness. It is our job. We care and we are working on it. So should you.

Profound revelation: All humans are WIRED to experience that which they see happen to others, as if they are having the experience themselves.

Dustin Curtis first told me about this concept on a bus ride from Boston to New York two years ago. I was despondent over how mechanistic and selfish neurobiology seems to paint human beings. Survival of the fittest and all of that. From an economic perspective, we all seek our own rational self-interest above that of others. What prevents us all from becoming infinitely bloodthirsty selfish pirates, anyway?

Dustin replied -- well, there's this thing called mirror neurons. He recently wrote about it in his blogazine. Our brains are wired to experience things that we see happening to others. Ultimately that is what empathy is -- being able to feel what others experience. And it comes built in to every one of us, thankfully.

As Jeremy Rifkin explains in the video above, the arrow of human history is really one about ever-increasing levels of empathy. Before we only had empathy for a our family group, then your tribe, onwards to a whole nation state, and so on. Recent developments in the state-of-the-art in empathy has now extended empathy to all human beings who live, and now even the whole Earth and all its creatures. Through this empathy, we are moving forward human capability, creation, love, and ultimately goodness in the world.

I'm certain we were put on this earth to make other people's experiences and lives better. So by giving into empathy, we can truly feel the same experiences as others and thereby improve them. This affects your life right now, no matter what you do. If you're creating something, anything, you probably want it to be good. You want to solve problems for your customers. You want their experience to be better. That's good for you, but even better for others. And making things better for others is what it's really all about.

This concept of mirror neurons as an underpinning of empathy and society fills me with great hope. We've got a shot, guys!

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Point a finger at someone and three point right back to you. It turns out this is not just a childhood adage.

How positively you see others is linked to how happy, kind-hearted and emotionally stable you are, according to new research by a Wake Forest University psychology professor... They discovered particularly strong associations between positively judging others and how enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous, emotionally stable and capable the person describes oneself and is described by others.

The study also found that how positively you see other people shows how satisfied you are with your own life, and how much you are liked by others.

In contrast, negative perceptions of others are linked to higher levels of narcissism and antisocial behavior. “A huge suite of negative personality traits are associated with viewing others negatively,” Wood says. “The simple tendency to see people negatively indicates a greater likelihood of depression and various personality disorders.”

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This research suggests that when you ask someone to rate the personality of a particular coworker or acquaintance, you may learn as much about the rater providing the personality description as the person they are describing. The level of negativity the rater uses in describing the other person may indeed indicate that the other person has negative characteristics, but may also be a tip off that the rater is unhappy, disagreeable, neurotic — or has other negative personality traits.

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